Space Photos of the Week: A Nebula Becomes a Butterfly

The Twin Jet Nebula has beautiful, illuminated “wings” of gas caused by the last stages of an old star “of low to intermediate mass.” The star’s outer layers are gone, leaving the core exposed and glowing. The Twin Jet Nebula is a bipolar nebula, meaning it contains two stars. Astronomers believe this is the reason for the distinctive wing shape as the dying stars expel gases.

Astronomers discovered a “radio phoenix.” They believe two galaxy clusters collided, causing faded electron clouds to come back to life, bursting with radio frequencies.

Hubble snapped this photo of the globular cluster NGC 1783, one of the biggest in the Large Magellanic Cloud. A globular cluster is where stars are densely held together by their own gravity. Astronomers measure the color and brightness of each star and predict the age of a cluster. NGC 1783 is fairly young at only 1.5 billion years old and has already had two different periods of star formation.

Photo of a mid-level solar flare on the sun as captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. The flare–the bright spot in the lower portion of the sun–is actually an explosion of radiation. This flare is a M 5.6 class flare, only a tenth the size of the most intense flares.

The Dawn spacecraft gets an upclose shot of Ceres, a dwarf planet that lies between Jupiter and Mars. The photo reveals a tall, cone-shaped mountain as well as interesting details of the planet’s terrain. Dawn is taking 11 days to take images of Ceres’ entire surface. It will do it six times in the next two months.